This movie outlines some strategies that you might want to consider in setting up your
Media Pro catalogs
in most cases the best strategy is to make one single catalog of all your images
Media Pro catalogs can hold up to a 128,000 files, if your collection
is no larger than that, I suggest giving the use of one single master catalog a try
this gives you one place to go whenever you're looking for an image
And lets you organize images in a comprehensive manner
if your catalog is larger than that however you'll need to use multiple catalogs
I’ll present some ways that you can consider to divide your images and media files
when you need more than one catalog
fortunately
you can open as many catalogs at a time as you like so even though the files are indifferent
catalogs you can still have access to the entire collection
although it's possible to make an open multiple catalogs
I suggest that you make an effort to use as few as possible it gets confusing if you have
too many catalogs that the images and files are spread between
if you're going to make
more than one catalog
then it's best to have a clearer understanding of what you put in each one
There are a couple of different strategies for dividing the files up
one way to do this would be to divide your collection by Media type, so you could have
the photos in one catalog, video in another catalogue your MP3 files in another
your fonts in another
and so on
make sure to name your catalogs in a clear way to reflect
What’s in that catalog
if you have hundreds of thousands of image files
than dividing gets a little trickier
the way you do the division
will depend a lot on the kind of work you do
and how much you have in any one collection
for instance you might decide that
you'd like to put all of your personal work in one catalog and all of your commercial
assignments in another one
another way to divide it would be to put all of the commercial assignments in one and say
all of the wedding work in a second catalog
another clean way to divide your collection along bright lines would be to divide by date
grouping all images from one year or several years together
in single catalogs
this can make a nice split between
the images from
uh... one group and images from another
you also might decide to divide your original files from your derivatives
so the raw original files could live in one catalog and the derivative files which would
be like the
master Tiff files or delivery JPEGs could live in a second catalog
if you have lots of original files then you may end up with something that looks like
this and in fact this is what I’ve done with my own collection where I have one single
catalog that has
every derivative file it ever made and that's uh... thirty, forty thousand images something
like that
and then that I divide my Raws
into multiple year catalogs
that have this nice
bright line between them
the folder structure that you implement
for storage of your pictures should reflect the bright line division
that you're doing between catalogs and this is going to keep you from getting confused
so if you've got
a division here between say derivative
and Raw it's nice to make sure that nothing that's in anyone folder straddles more than
one of these catalogs and when I say folder I don't just mean that you know the bottom
level folders
but I also mean a top-level parent folder
so in
say the 2004
year folder, there are lots of subfolders for different projects that were shot during
that time
of course you can
take a catalog and you can split it in two if your collection grows larger then what the
catalog can actually hold
and you can also take multiple different catalogs
and merge them together into one single larger catalog
there's another movie on the site
that goes to the process for both
splitting
and merging catalogs in the end the decision that you make about how you want to catalog
your images
to split those uh... split your collection up is really depended very much upon what
you have in your collection
and the way you like to work